CORPORATE RULEHuge global corporations are becoming ever more powerful, eroding the regulatory powers of nation-states and riding roughshod over the rights of citizens to determine their own future.

ENGULF AND DEVOUR, INC.Globalization has sparked a frenzy of corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&As). These new mega-corporations threaten competition and increase the risk of monopoly.

. This investment has become a major component of foreign direct investment (FDI) as companies buy up overseas competitors. In 1997, 58 of these deals were worth more than $1 billion each.

. In 1997 more than $1.6 trillion was spent on corporate mergers and acquisitions. Most have been in financial services, telecommunications, insurance, life sciences and the media. Some of the biggest recently include:2

BABY, YOU'RE A RICH MAN TOOEconomic globalization has boosted income inequality dramatically, both within and between countries. The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth living in the poorest jumped from 30:1 in 1960 to 74:1 in 1997.

DEADLY DEBTThe Third World debt burden grows yearly with little hope of repayment. New debts are contracted to pay off current interest charges, resulting in a continual haemorrhage of wealth from poor countries to Western banks, governments, corporations and agencies like the IMF and World Bank. Recent debt write-offs may reduce the level of increase for some of the poorest countries but are unlikely to lighten the burden overall.

. In 1996 sub-Saharan Africa paid $2.5 billion more in debt service than it received in new long-term loans and credits.

. The external debt of the region has ballooned by 400% since the IMF and World Bank began managing African economies through imposed 'structural adjustment' conditions.

. The IMF has transferred over $3 billion out of Africa since the mid-1980s and the continent spends four times more on debt-interest payments than it does on healthcare.5

. Latin America's most indebted country, Brazil, owes more than $235 billion even though it paid off $216 billion in interest from 1989 to 1997.6

PINBALL CAPITALShort-term speculative capital whizzes around the world leaving ravaged economies and human devastation in its wake. East Asia (Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines) suffered a destructive net reversal of private capital flows from 1996 to 1997 of $105 billion.1

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